Thrown to the lions
Martyrdom of Ignatius of Antioch
The journey is over. Ignatius has crossed the Aegean, passed through Macedonia and Greece, and arrived in Rome. The letters have been written and sent. The churches along the road have wept and prayed and honored him. He has said everything he needed to say.
Now there is only the arena.
The Colosseum in Rome holds fifty thousand people. On the days when condemned criminals and prisoners are thrown to the animals, the crowds fill it completely. Ignatius of Antioch — bishop, theologian, letter-writer, the third man to lead the church in the city where believers were first called Christians — walks in as a spectacle.
The accounts of his death are sparse. We have no eyewitness record of the arena itself, only the tradition that he died there. What we have instead are his own words, written on the road, which tell us what he believed was happening.
He believed he was completing something. That the journey from Antioch to Rome was not a defeat but a liturgy — that his body, ground by the teeth of wild beasts, would become bread offered to God. That the death he was moving toward was a birth he was moving into.
The lions do what lions do. Ignatius is gone.
What remains are seven letters. Scholars have been reading them for nineteen centuries. They are still startling in their intimacy, their theological depth, their strange and urgent joy.
The man wanted to be forgotten so that God could be remembered. History would not cooperate.
“Now I begin to be a disciple. I care for nothing, of visible or invisible things, so that I may but win Christ. Let fire and the cross, let the companies of wild beasts, let breaking of bones and tearing of limbs — let the whole body of the devil come upon me; only let me win Jesus Christ.”
— Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Romans, c. 107 AD
“Yes most assuredly, and I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and count them nothing but refuse, that I may gain Christ”
Ignatius did not want to be a martyr in the sense of wanting to suffer. He wanted to be fully given — and the arena happened to be the form that giving took.
The desire he articulates — let me win Christ — is Paul's language from Philippians, the same letter Paul wrote from prison awaiting his own possible execution. Both men had the same grammar for the same desire: not death as an end, but Christ as a destination that death could not interrupt.
What would it mean to want Christ that specifically — not blessing, not blessing attached to Christ, but Christ himself, whatever the cost of the wanting?